New on Indiegogo: Qii, the rollable keyboard for your smartphone and tablet

Helsinki based high tech firm Canatu started a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo today for their rollable keyboard for smartphones and tablets Qii (we certainly covered a lot of keyboards recently!).

The Qii is designed as a mobile keyboard for phones and tablets: you can roll up, fit it in your pocket and unroll as needed. The connection to your phone or tablet is made through Bluetooth. It promises to “turn your smartphone into a computer”.

The keyboard is coated to make sure it stays clean – and according to the developers, it should withstand quite some abuse too, including coffee and the occasional aggression with a hammer (!):

Qii has an anti fingerprint coating to keep it clean and a textured surface for easy touch typing. It’s dirt and water resistant, so you don’t have to worry about spilling and it’s easily washable with soap and water. And, since Qii’s rollable electronics are printed, it’s tough.

At this point, Qii has “a functioning table top demo” and it says it’s working on making the device palm sized. There’s still quite some work to be done before they reach this stage, appartently: a lot of design work, refining of the technology – and even the design and source the dedicated chip running the Qii touch algorithm.

To fund all this, they estimate that they’ll need about $ 1,85 million. The makers claim that Qii will work with Apple, Android, Blackberry, Windows and Palm devices and tablets. If they reach their funding goals, they estimate the first deliveries of prototypes in May 2013. The first “real” Qii’s would reach consumers at the earliest in October 2013.